A bridge between online and offline mobilization: #Rezist Movement
A bridge between online and offline mobilization: #Rezist Movement

Summary/Abstract: The Romanian Movement from January-February 2017 initiated on Facebook under the name #Rezist represented the largest protest since the collapse of the communist regime in 1989. The present research is based on the premise that the online participation to political life influences offline participation and that social media, particularly Facebook, has a great power of democratization, in the case of #Rezist Movement.Previous papers submit opposite views on how the internet and social media influences real participation to political and civic life. Some researchers talk about the limited effect of Internet on mobilizing new participants (Boulianne, 2015, Christensen 2011), while other papers highlighted the positive influence of the internet on political participation (Lee,Chen and Huang 2013). Another approach is that social media platforms allow quick access to social or political information, citizens learn about it, which determines citizen participation (Gil de Zúñiga, Jung and Valenzuela, 2012). How the Romanian online environment managed to change the political events in a moment of high social pressure, especially by acting offline? Is, nowadays, social media a force for democratization? As we will see in #Rezist Movement case, social media may have the potential to become political mobilization arenas among groups that are traditionally left out of debate or less visible in political arenas (Segaard, 2015). Based on ten interviews as qualitative research method and on the analysis of two Facebook groups who supported the protests from 2017, the present paper argues that Facebook was not only an online instrument of socialization and interaction between individuals or groups with similar interests, but a catalyst for the mobilization of former silent groups to emerge from the online environment.The research also validates the mobilization thesis of social media, Facebook being particularly effective in promoting and defending a national cause, like the one of #Rezist Movement.

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